Thursday, April 3, 2008

Another question: anyone use SharpSchool?

I've just been asked by my district to undergo training for our newest portal, SharpSchool. It looks like the first portal designed for k-12 I've seen in a while that incorporates many interactive, web 2.0 features. The fact that the demo video took five minutes to load on my computer raised some concerns about how well our computer infrastructure can handle it, but I'm hopeful that will change. Anyone have any experience with it?

2 comments:

Laura, did you ever receive any feedback on SharpSchool? My school district has been evaluating CMS solutions and they're one of our contenders at this point. I'm going to be contacting their references soon, but I'd love to hear about any insights you may have at this point. Thanks!

hey Brad, thanks for your comment. I have to say that the reception at my school has been less than favorable. As someone who is considered by her colleagues as "tech-savvy", I had considerable trouble using it, and also found the "drill-down" interface really irritating (it requires five or six clicks to complete a task that require one or two clicks in other programs). I completed a "webinar" with the SharpSchool folks on how to set up an online class, but adding students became so cumbersome that I am abandoning the idea and hoping to move my content to another Ning site instead. I've used BlackBoard and have heard good things about Moodle, but I'm afraid I can't recommend this one too strongly. Hope that helps, and good luck with your choice!